CrODA-gator: An Open Access CrowdSourcing Platform as a Service

The huge increase of mobile devices and the advancements of their sensing and computing capabilities have made the mobile crowd a real-time opportunistic data generator. Leveraging crowdsourced data creates new opportunities and challenges in many computing domains. As a result extensible, scalable and inter-operable cloud-based platforms have been implemented to simplify management and visual mapping of the large volume of data to meaningful representations, which can be then used for the development of novel applications. Still, to the authors best knowledge, these platforms do not offer direct open access to cloud-based crowdsourcing service(s). In this paper, “CrODA-gator”, an Open Access Crowdsourcing Platform as a Service, is introduced that follows a scalable and extensible architecture, which offers public open access to the platform's features for direct use by data contributors and application developers. This is a key attribute for the uptake of such a platform. Finally, an experimental evaluation is conducted to support the design choices, providing qualitative evidence on the expected performance of the platform's mechanisms.